Abstract
The practice of high-stakes testing, using a single test score to determine major decisions, has become commonplace in school systems around the world. Tests now hold extremely important consequences for students, teachers, schools, and entire school systems. Because the stakes of current tests are so high, they guide a wide range of educational choices, including curricula, materials, pedagogy, teacher preparation, educational programming, and language medium of instruction. In this way, high-stakes tests result in de facto language education policies. This chapter examines the relationship between high-stakes testing practices and language education policies to show how testing becomes de facto language policy in schools.
The chapter begins with a brief exploration of the history of the standardized testing movement. It then presents recent empirical research that has investigated high-stakes testing from a language education policy perspective in order to deepen understandings of how high-stakes standardized tests become de facto language policies in implementation, as schools respond to the exacting pressures of testing. The chapter documents the detrimental impact of monolingual testing, focusing on the formal education of children and how students and the education they receive is affected by recent testing practices. It then explores the potential for multilingual assessment informed by recent translanguaging theory to address these issues.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that as this chapter goes to press, NCLB has been replaced by a new federal law called the Every Student Succeeds Act (passed into law in December 2015). While this new law allows for greater state autonomy on testing, all states still have the same assessment systems in place as they had under NCLB. To date there has been no reduction of high-stakes testing in US schools, and the full impact of this new legislation remains to be seen.
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Menken, K. (2016). High-Stakes Tests as De Facto Language Education Policies. In: Shohamy, E., Or, I., May, S. (eds) Language Testing and Assessment. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02326-7_25-1
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